The thesis is an inquiry into how leadership is performed narratively in the cultural sector.
Chapter 1 draws the cultural sector as a narrative landscape, and the reader is invited on
a tour around this narrative landscape as seen through the eyes of some of the top guns in
the cultural sector. Seen from this vantage, leadership in the cultural sector seems to be
predominantly performed by relating narratives with reference to the metanarrative of the
Enlightenment. The inquiry, however, draws on Lyotard (1984) to argue that such
extralinguistic legitimization is in a crisis of legitimacy, wherefore the inquiry embarks on
a problematization of the dominant understanding of leadership in the cultural sector with
the activist aspiration of suggesting a postmoderning understanding of leadership in the
cultural sector being performatively legitimized. Chapter 2 argues in favor of a relational,
non-entitative understanding of narratives and it points to emplotment as a process of
finding the best fit. This relational understanding of narratives allows the project to inquire
into leadership performed narratively in all kinds of empirical settings, not confining itself
to formal leadership contexts. Chapter 3 offers a genealogic approach to what the project
has defined as the dominant narrative in the cultural sector, the narrative of art for art’s
sake (the AFAS narrative), which the project argues function as an implicit standard. This
includes notions of aesthetic autonomy such as suggested by Kant in 1790, artistic freedom
and art for its own sake such as claimed by artists in the Romantic era, and the arm’s
length principle as the ‘constitution of cultural policies’ in the post WW2 Western world.
Chapter 4 provides an overview of alternative voices which have challenged the dominant
narrative. These include post colonial studies, cultural entrepreneurial studies and
consumer behavior studies which in various ways propose alternative ways to lead and
support the cultural sector. Chapter 5 links the discussions in chapter 3 and chapter 4 to
leadership studies, notably to discussions of leader-centered orientations versus leading
relationally orientations. The chapter concludes by suggesting a new sensibility towards
understanding leadership and meditates on how this might be achieved, paying attentions
to the possibilities of overcoming the putative crisis of legitimacy the inquiry is placed in.
Chapter 6 relates a case-study of Malmoe City Library which endeavors into a difficult,
yet very promising process of reformulating what a library may become in a contemporary
context. This process challenges the dominant narrative and thus the current
understanding of what a library should be, and this deviation from the dominant narrative
challenges leadership. Chapter 7 assembles three different approaches to challenges the dominant narrative and to make new interpretive resources available to the understanding
of leadership in the cultural sector. First, givrum.nu, a social movement working with arts,
second, Mogens Holm, a leader in the cultural sector in a transition phase, and third,
Copenhagen Phil, a classical symphony orchestra striving to avoid becoming a parallel
society phenomenon. These case studies are conducted as written interviews with the
cases, in an attempted un-edited form to also introduce relational processes informed by a
power with relation to my own research project. Chapter 8 reflects on the case-studies in
chapter 6 and chapter 7 in light of the two approaches to leadership discussed in chapter 5.
It does so by linking my study to relational leadership theory in order to see how this
theoretical field might inform my inquiry and how my inquiry might inform this field. It
equally offers five possible reconstructions of the cases before concluding the research
project by summing up contributions to the empirical field and the research fields, as well
as by pointing to areas which could be further developed in future research.
In line with the aspirations of the relational constructionist framework of the project, the
inquiry does not offer a conclusion. Instead it encourages further reconstructions, thus
submitting itself to the performative legitimization it argues in favor of.

Departing from my interest in finding key factors determining a developing
country firms’ export success, this research explores two fascinating topics: one is
the debate on whether a developing country’s producers should become involved
in marketing functions where a developed country’s firms already hold a strong
position, and the other is the very limited attention given in the export literature to
the role of relational capability in a firm’s export business....

Despite ten years of direct regulation, our study of Danish lower secondary schools shows that they do not provide online access to the GPA for individual public schools (N=1,592). Using Lipsky’s gate-keeping theory, we investigate the lack of data provision as indicator not only of professionals’ being reluctant to accept imposed standards and control from central level (top-down) but also avoiding demands from parents (and children) on transparency and accountability (bottom-up). The lack of accessibility of grades on the web can thus be seen as a classical gate-keeping mechanism evolving in the age of information society where expectations of end-of-gatekeeping by providing accessibility and transparency using information systems has been outnumbered by classical forces of gate-keeping.

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Boundary-crossing Leadership Cooperation in the MNC The Case of ‘Group Mindset’ in Solar A/S

Nielsen, Rikke Kristine(Frederiksberg, 2014)

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Resume:

This dissertation deals with global mindset leadership understood as border- and boundary-crossing
leadership within the multinational corporation by exploring the concept of global mindset as both an
individual managerial meta-competence, as well as a strategic organizational capability. The research
project presented explores the practical and theoretical avenues for working with global mindset as a
strategic lever and method of securing business strategy executional agility, which is explored in the
context of a single-case study organization, Solar - an internationalizing medium-sized MNC seeking to
work in practice with global mindset leadership development and enactment as a strategy execution
facilitator.
Internationalizing corporations often experience the liability of foreignness when moving into new markets,
and in effect suffer a globalization penalty vis-à-vis local competition in different markets. At the same time,
they are pushed to consider the potential non-transferability of domestic competitive advantages and business
models, when moving into new territory and may have to make adjustments to cater to different customer
preferences and other local specificities in a variety of markets simultaneously. Further, international and
global collaboration is more complex than local collaboration and as a consequence, corporations need to be
better at collaborating in order to receive the same effect compared to domestic operations alone. This is due
to the fact that culturally and strategically employees and managers at all hierarchical levels understand each
other less, while language barriers may at the same time place a strain on communication and collaboration.
Transaction costs rise as corporations move from high-context collaboration with low psychic distance in a
domestic setting or between relatively similar groupings, where many things are shared and taken for granted
and thus need not be explicated to a low-context communication setting where little or no common ground
can be taken for granted. This dissertation argues the case that leadership with a global mindset is relevant
for companies and organizations that make strategic use of global mindset as a driver for global business
strategy. As such global mindset is seen as strategic global mindset in that the rationale for developing global
mindset is as a facilitator of business strategy. The context of the individual company is an indicator for what
global mindset means in the particular company, and for who can benefit from it. Global mindset is not seen
as generic, but highly contextual when looking at the practical implementation of the concept empirically.
The aim of working with global mindset, then, is the optimization of global mindset in relation to the
context, the managerial role and the business strategy, not an end in itself.

Following the workshop “Practicing Humanities and Social Sciences
in Management Education” at the University of St.Gallen in November
2012, the Copenhagen Business School was happy to host the follow-up
workshop “Humanities and Social Sciences in Management Education
– Writing, Researching, Teaching”. Yet again we were proud to welcome
international scholar adding great ideas and perspectives and initiating
fruitful discussion concerning the debates around management education.
This booklet contains the program, paper abstracts as well as articles
from the online journalism incubator Studentreporter.org and the
online Grasp-Magazine, summarizing various aspects of the workshop.
We would like to thank all scholars and participants for their great
contributions as well as a the Haniel Foundation for making the events
possible.
For further information about the workshops, projects and ongoing
discussions please visit our online-platform: www.practical-reasoning.eu.

This project is in line with the Scandinavian approach to the welfare state and the active, public role for stimulating
and facilitating innovation (Bason, 2010). Researching this pilot effort to build an incubator for public innovation is
thus not only a study of how it could be done, but also an inquiry into the role of public support for an innovative public sector (cf. Mazzucato, 2014; Ansell and Torfing, 2014; Osborne and Brown, 2013). Current societal challenges are creating pressure for the public sector to increase effectiveness and deliver better services. Many agree that the relationship between people and the public sector in general and public services in particular should be radically reshaped (Manzini and Staszowski, 2013).
There has been a recent move away from new public
management based approaches to public innovation
(Bason, 2010). Generally this means a move towards a
more collaborative (Ansell and Torfing, 2014) and symbiotic process (Mazzucato, 2014). Hartley (2013) shows there are both great overlaps between public and private innovation, and distinct differences. Notably, incentive to learn from others is less clear in the public sector where new knowledge is not an obvious driver of competitive capacity.
In conclusion, research also points to the need to develop more local-specific models and approaches to innovation-support in public organisations. Beyond the triple-helix model of collaboration (Etzkowits and Leydesdorff, 2000) public innovation needs support from a local organisation that can provide the solution to the incentive problem,
and feed innovation processes with organisational support. Whereas incubators have provided this support for business start-ups, developing an incubator-model for public innovation is new and timely.

Over the past few years, the tourist industry has come to be recognised as a way of providing strategic support for sustainable local business development. In this article we attempt to define an appropriate innovation concept in relation to tourism on the basis of an attractor principle. We then discuss the concept of entrepreneurship in connection with tourism, looking at its significance in its relationship with local business development, thereby positing the premise of social entrepreneurship. This frame of reference is used in five cases in the analysis. The analysis shows that it is possible to innovate and draw up plans for new attractors but that it is considerably more difficult to convert these plans into reality through social entrepreneurship. The conclusion is that we need to focus upon organisation of semi-public tourist organisations, if we want tourism to promote local business development.

The world wants more entrepreneurs so badly, that it has become a major priority of governments all over the
world trying to produce them. Based on Industrial PhD collaboration between the Danish Science Park,
Symbion A/S and Copenhagen Business School, this dissertation presents a unique opportunity to study how
the interactions between technology-based entrepreneurs and an Accelerator programme may lead to
increased entrepreneurial capacity, learning and growth. The Industrial PhD setting offers privileged access to
entrepreneurs, advisors, incubator management and investors, and we get to listen to stories seldom told in
this field. As follows, the write-up of the ethnographic fieldwork is a narrative multi-voiced analysis in search of
entrepreneurial learning in an incubator context.
The phenomenon of business incubation – in this dissertation referred to as incubating activities - is originally
intended as a forum that is shielded off from the everydayness of things, with the purpose of adding resources
and removing barriers to venture creation. The idea is that entrepreneuring actors will be offered
complementary resources and forced to spend time on planning and strategies in a helicopter perspective,
which in the end will benefit the process and make venture success more likely. Policy makers together with
researchers of entrepreneurship policy and incubation, to a large degree assume that entrepreneurial actors
somehow lack skills and resources and cannot easily acquire these themselves, and furthermore that it is
possible to affect the resources, behaviour and skills of entrepreneurs. It has nevertheless been shown that
enhancing entrepreneurial growth from support activities is not as easy, even if the intentions are good and the
resources invested considerable (Blackburn and Schaper 2012, Bruneel et al. 2012, Mason and Brown 2013).
It is also taken for granted that entrepreneurs are open to learning and foreign intervention (help and support).
This study shows that this is not always the case. Hence, the dissertation explores a highly political and
delicate matter touching upon the legitimacy of business incubation.